Milagros
Janine Antoni
Filmed in 2013, Janine Antoni discusses the sculptures in her solo exhibition Within at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Antoni explains how this body of work was inspired by small religious votive charms called milagros (“miracles”), which often take the shape of an ailing area of the body, such as a limb or organ.
For her sculptures, Antoni grafted together resin body parts—a hand clasping a coccyx, for instance—to explore the meanings created by two impossible juxtapositions. Antoni is shown at work in her Brooklyn, New York studio.
Featured artists
About the artists
Janine Antoni’s work blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture. Transforming everyday activities such as eating, bathing, and sleeping into ways of making art, Antoni’s primary tool for making sculpture has always been her own body. She has chiseled cubes of lard and chocolate with her teeth, washed away the faces of soap busts made in her own likeness, and used the brainwave signals recorded while she dreamed at night as a pattern for weaving a blanket the following morning.
